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> But I lost access to paid services that I had set up with social login, besides all Google's services ( GCP, firebase, youtube premium, google one, subscripti

> But I lost access to paid services that I had set up with social login, besides all Google's services ( GCP, firebase, youtube premium, google one, subscriptions paid through play store, google ads, etc, etc). So you gave Google total control over your entire online presence, tying a bunch of things you depend on into a tight bundle that would all get banned at once. And, by including so many things, you created more opportunities for something you did with one of them to trigger a ban of all of them. > The google stack is very convenient, ... except when you get totally shut down for no reason. Which is an absolutely predictable consequence. You have a very strange idea of convenience. > and it's 2022, I'm not going to start hosting my email server, This reads to me as "I'm unwilling to take even the most trivial steps to solve the problem". > But what if I get reported on my domain name? What if that gets suspended or blacklisted too? That is a risk, but, at least as of today, it's much, much harder to get a domain name shut down than to get something like a Google account shut down. Nonetheless, you should probably be isolating things that are really important to you under separate domain names unless they NEED to be tied together. > Do we own our phone numbers, emails, handles, PO boxes, addresses? The user agreements for most of those will say no. The standard on the Internet right now is "We can cut you off for any reason whatsoever and you have no recourse". It's right there in black and white. And it's been that way forever. Maybe it's wrong. Maybe there should be legal changes. Maybe there should at least be changes in common expectations. But at the moment, that is how it works. So don't become overdependent on any of them, and don't set up a situation where losing one also loses others. This is pretty basic stuff.

samtho 5y ago
There is a lot of victim blaming here. If Google wishes to continue to provide an email service, it should be a reasonable expectation that you don’t get your account disabled due to some automated false positive or at least have a real appeal process to reenable it. Because the opposite is true, it’s a bigger systemic problem that should be addressed one way or another.
- Hizonner 5y ago
  I agree. And the fastest, most effective way to address it is for people to stop encouraging it by using Google's email or authentication services. Among other things. If you then also want to outlaw lazy, hair-trigger account cancellations, and all the other stuff these guys do to shift all effort and risk onto their users, and for that matter all the other hidden ways they exploit the users, then I won't complain. I'll even cheer you on. But I probably won't live long enough to see that. And after those (completely proper) laws were enacted, I would expect a lot of these "free" services to go away entirely. Requiring them to do it right would also require them to pay the cost to do it right, and I would expect that to get passed on to the users.
iamjkt 5y ago
It's not even targeted at me and I found this painful to read. The point you suggested that hosting their own email server is the most trivial step they could do to solve the problem is when I switched off.

samtho 5y ago

There is a lot of victim blaming here. If Google wishes to continue to provide an email service, it should be a reasonable expectation that you don’t get your account disabled due to some automated false positive or at least have a real appeal process to reenable it. Because the opposite is true, it’s a bigger systemic problem that should be addressed one way or another.

Hizonner 5y ago
I agree. And the fastest, most effective way to address it is for people to stop encouraging it by using Google's email or authentication services. Among other things. If you then also want to outlaw lazy, hair-trigger account cancellations, and all the other stuff these guys do to shift all effort and risk onto their users, and for that matter all the other hidden ways they exploit the users, then I won't complain. I'll even cheer you on. But I probably won't live long enough to see that. And after those (completely proper) laws were enacted, I would expect a lot of these "free" services to go away entirely. Requiring them to do it right would also require them to pay the cost to do it right, and I would expect that to get passed on to the users.

iamjkt 5y ago

It's not even targeted at me and I found this painful to read. The point you suggested that hosting their own email server is the most trivial step they could do to solve the problem is when I switched off.